CRIME

By Marilyn Stasio

Published: June 24, 2001

''It's funny the places you end up.'' That's the last line, and pretty much the whole sad story, of BITTERROOT (Simon & Schuster, $25), James Lee Burke's latest meditation on the devastation to the landscape when people make war over what they view as their territorial rights. Billy Bob Holland, the Texas lawyer who carries the moral baggage in this trailblazing series of the New West, has the right idea: he just wants to go fishing. But he can't ignore the distress signals coming out of the Bitterroot Valley in Montana, where an old friend is single-handedly battling a mining company with a scorched-earth policy toward the environment. As if cyanide in the old swimming hole weren't bad enough, the region is infested with brutish bikers, psychotic ex-cons, fanatical militia types and best-selling novelists.

Burke pours venomous contempt on the lot of them, and when he lights his literary match, the blaze is fierce and cleansing. But when the knife fights and bar brawls are over and the rapes and murders have been solved, there are still those larger issues to be dealt with -- the widespread conviction that ''the country's going to hell'' and the violent solutions people advance to correct that. To his credit, Billy Bob admits he can't handle these warped notions of patriotism and heads back home to go fishing.

Bartholomew Gill isn't the first mystery writer to see something sinister in Opus Dei, a secular Roman Catholic order founded on the idea that physical and mental labor is a kind of spiritual mission. But he is forthright in arguing that a fanatical faction of the order is out to take over -- if not the world, then the Vatican bank, the Curia and the political leadership of Latin America. But never mind currency manipulation and political assassinations; in THE DEATH OF AN IRISH SINNER (Morrow, $24), these militants have the nerve to go after Peter McGarr, the witty and literate Dublin police detective who gives soul to this series.

McGarr is visiting relatives in the country when a parish priest asks him to hush up the murder of a religious scholar and Opus Dei leader who is found in her garden with a medieval torture device around her neck. Pursuing the investigation, McGarr is stonewalled, threatened and finally punished, in a manner that distracts him from justice and puts him in mind of vengeance. Despite this justifiable show of temper, he keeps his intellectual grip on what one character sees as the higher question of ''how faith plays out in the institution of the church. The form it takes, how and why it becomes warped . . . the grotesqueries that result.''

Steve Hamilton spins such a smooth yarn, it's a real shock when he suddenly pulls the wool over our eyes in THE HUNTING WIND (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95). But if we don't see it coming, neither does Alex McKnight, a too-trusting private eye who is just as taken in as we are by the romantic notion of being able to reunite two sweethearts, lost to each other for 30 years. Alex, a former cop and onetime catcher for a minor-league baseball club, is trying to be a good guy when he lets an old teammate, Randy Wilkins, coax him away from his favorite pub on Michigan's Upper Peninsula to go searching for a mystery woman on the mean streets of Detroit. The way Alex tells it, in his bemused narrative voice, this is the kind of dumb thing he tends to do.

Hamilton knows a thing or two about good-old-buds behavior, so the almost comic adventure of Alex and Randy revisiting their youth is quickly followed by a sobering chaser that forces them to face up to the realities of the past. And that's only the first flip-flop. The plot is so cagey and the characters have such ambiguous claims on the truth, it's hard to guess where this story is going, especially when it turns violent. Honest Alex is the first to admit he's out of his existential depth in this noir nether world of lies and deception, but he's smart enough to find his way home.

Of all the dastardly crimes that might spark a good whodunit, a buggy robbery doesn't seem very promising -- unless the author is P. L. Gaus, who writes a discerning series set among the Old Order Amish sects of Holmes County, Ohio. Like the suspicious road accident that opens CLOUDS WITHOUT RAIN (Ohio University, cloth, $24.95; paper, $12.95), the buggy robberies are an ominous signpost to the serious issues troubling the peaceful order of Walnut Creek Township: the land development that threatens the Amish farming culture, the disaffection of teenagers with the humble ways of their elders and the materialism that has ushered into the community such infernal devices as computers and cell phones. Gaus is a sensitive storyteller who matches his cadences to the measured pace of Amish life, catching the tensions among the village's religious factions. And if he doesn't manage to get into the heads of the sect's sober leaders, he provides a keen observer in Michael Branden, a local college professor who lends the reader his eyes and ears and sympathetic heart.

Like the rivers in Texas, Rick Riordan's novels meander all over the map, overrunning their banks and flooding backyards, flushing out interesting life forms wherever they go. THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO AUSTIN (Bantam, $23.95) takes a rambling route to tell us about the sabotaging of a start-up computer software company and the murder of one of its young founders. Tres Navarre, a smart-mouthed English lit professor from San Antonio, gets caught up in this one because his brother, a gonzo computer genius in a wheelchair, is the prime suspect. But that's the serious part. The fun part is watching Tres trying to get a coherent statement out of characters who are drunk, stoned, belligerent and itching to party. Whether he's helping to bust up a wedding at Scholz Bier Garten or attending the raucous funeral of a Jimmy Buffett ''Parrot Head'' (held on the highway in ''a prefab Box-o-God wedged between a Taco Bell and a While-U-Wait key shop''), Tres has a knack for showing readers a crazy good time.